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PORTLAND, Maine—Onstage, Zak and Lena Kendall sing in steady harmony about the flood that left their hometown under 8 feet of water. It’s the sixth track on their new album, “All the Light in Autumn,” and, like much of their work, pairs folk riffs with stories of climate disruption.
“After a few weeks of heavy snow, Christmas rolled around, it warmed up to 55 degrees and we got torrential downpours,” Zak told a crowd of a few hundred at the band’s album-release show. “All the snow and water came rushing down from Sugarloaf and Saddleback mountains.”
Locals were paddling down Main Street in Farmington, Maine, in canoes, Zak recalled. Rather than join them, he turned the icy floodwaters into material for a song about climate anxiety. “Been afraid my whole life of the rise in the tide,” the siblings sing on stage.
GoldenOak, made up of siblings Zak and Lena Kendall, bassist Mike Knowles and drummer Jackson Cromwell, formed around 2016. As the band’s main lyricist, Zak draws on his background in ecology and his close attention to how climate change is reshaping daily life in Maine.
At the College of the Atlantic, he studied human ecology, immersing himself in climate science and environmental issues while sneaking in songwriting between classes. After graduating, he dove into climate activism as executive director of Maine Youth for Climate Justice.
Then he began to notice something: tropes of displacement, violent storms and dying forests were bleeding into his lyrics. He saw a way to combine his passions of climate activism and folk music, and that convergence has defined his songwriting ever since.
“It was scary at first,” he said. “When you write love songs or other popular music, there are set maps to follow. Trying to incorporate climate change into music isn’t something a lot of people do.”
Bands like AJR and Grammy-winning artist Jon Batiste have done the same. “As an artist, you have to make a statement,” Batiste said in an interview with Covering Climate Now. “You got to bring people together. People’s power is the way that you can change things in the world.”
Batiste called his recent song “Petrichor” a “warning set to a dance beat.” GoldenOak’s discography has taken it a step further,